Investigators' Blog
Public Lecture – Professor Ingrid Daubechies
Public Lecture – Professor Alan Hastings
Te Pūnaha Matatini presents
Distinguished Professor Alan Hastings University of California, Davis. Professor Alan is visiting New Zealand and will be giving public lectures around the country.
Driven by human forces, there are great challenges to maintain environmental systems and environmental services. Environmental management depends on predictions of the results of management actions which must also be made in the context of limited resources and in the face of conflicting desires of participants. Beginning with an overview of several challenging issues in environmental management including invasive species, fisheries management, and the provision of other ecosystem services, this public talk will focus on how prediction and management on appropriate time scales depends on relatively simple mathematical descriptions, incorporating relevant ecological and economic details, looking at several particular challenging systems that illustrate the general principles: algal-coral-grazer systems and the maintenance of healthy reefs and control of invasive species.
For more on Professor Alan Hastings, see http://two.ucdavis.edu/~me/
We are very pleased to announce the following public lectures
Christchurch Wednesday 2nd September
Where: Room 031, Level 0, Erskine building, University of Canterbury
When: 6pm
Hosted by the University of Canterbury in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Alex James | Alex.James@canterbury.ac.nz
Dunedin Friday 4th September
Where: Archway 4 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago,
When: 5:30pm
Hosted by the University of Otago in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Auckland Tuesday 8th September
Where: University of Auckland, City campus 303-G23
When: 6pm
Hosted by the Department of Physics, The University of Auckland, in association with Te Pūnaha Matatini
ALL WELCOME
RSVP | Sarah Hikuroa | s.hikuroa@auckland.ac.nz
Shaun on New Zealand’s Economy in Innovation
Here’s Shaun talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about innovation and New Zealand’s economic future. Listen here
Les on the history of economics in New Zealand
Here’s Les talking with Mark Sainsbury, on RadioLive about the history of economics in New Zealand. Listen here
A prize of one’s own
by Kate Hannah
In 1947 Elizabeth Joan Batham made New Zealand science history when she became the first woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize, medal, or award.[i] When she was named the 1947 recipient of the Hamilton Memorial Prize “for the encouragement of an early career researcher currently based in New Zealand for scientific or technological research in New Zealand”, that prize, named after Augustus Hamilton, the 1909-1910 President of the Society, had been running for 24 years.
The first award established by the Society, in 1911, the Hutton Medal for earth, plant, and animal sciences (named for Captain FW Hutton FRS, 1836-1905, who was the first President, 1904-05) is now awarded annually, rotating through the disciplines, but between 1911- 1995 was awarded every three years. More medals and awards were established over the next 104 years, so that in 2015 we now have 12 annual awards and another 9 awards biennially, triennially, or irregularly.
Back to Betty Batham. She was responsible for the redevelopment of what is now the Portobello Marine Biological Station, University of Otago, which during her tenure (1950-1974) gained “an international reputation, although for many years it was little involved in routine teaching and research activities of the university,”[ii] which seems to be her successor, John Jillet’s careful way of summarising the sexism Batham faced.[iii]
For her efforts, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1962, and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Otago set up a prize in her name in 2004. The deep-sea vessel at Portobello that provides visitors with a virtual benthic (sea-floor) experience is called the DSV Batham.[iv]
Betty Batham in the laboratory, 1962
The next woman to win a Royal Society of New Zealand prize was Lucy Cranwell Smith, awarded the Hector Medal in 1954:
Lucy Cranwell Smith, citation for Hector Medal
The Hector Medal’s citation is currently “for outstanding work in chemical, physical, or mathematical and information sciences … awarded annually in rotation among the disciplines.”[vi] It was previously broader: “for plant sciences, chemical sciences, human sciences, solid earth sciences, mathematical physical and engineering sciences, and animal sciences”.[vii]
Lucy Cranwell Smith, who went on to have a highly successful career in palynology at the University of Arizona, was the first woman to win the Hector Medal. It has been won by 2 other women in the subsequent half century. Dame Patricia Bergquist, the eminent zoologist and anatomist, was awarded the Hector Medal in 1989 for her work on invertebrate anatomy, and was made a Dame in 1994 for her contribution to science. In 2012, Margaret Brimble was the Hector Medal recipient, for “excellence in chemical sciences.”[viii]
The Hector Medal, named for Sir James Hector, is the second oldest of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s medals – it was first awarded in 1912, and since then, has been awarded to 99 men, and 3 women. The oldest award – the Hutton Medal established in 1911 – has been awarded to 41 men and 2 women in its over 100-year history. The Humanities Aronui Medal (2011), Mason Durie Medal (2012), Pickering Medal (2004), Thomson Medal (1985), Cooper Medal (1958), R.J. Scott Medal (1997), Hercus Medal (1997), and the T.K.Sidey Medal (1933) have all never been awarded to a woman.
Dion O’Neale, July 2015
Six of the male Hector Medal winners now have other Royal Society awards or prizes named after them: Leonard Cockayne, the 1912 winner, and Lucy Cranwell Smith’s mentor, for whom the Leonard Cockayne Memorial Lecture Series Award was named; Ernest Rutherford, 1916 winner, the Rutherford Medal. Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) was awarded the Hector Medal in 1932, and since 1997 the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal has been presented for outstanding work in the social sciences; Charles Fleming received the Hector Medal in 1963 – and the Royal Society’s Fleming Award was inaugurated in 1989; Trevor Hatherton, for whom the Hatherton Award is named, won the Hector Medal in 1981; in 1998, Paul Callaghan, in whose name the Callaghan Medal for Science Communication was commissioned, was awarded the Hector Medal.
Women do have a prize of their own, of a sort – or at least one of the 21 prizes and awards is named after a woman. The Dame Joan Metge Medal, commissioned in 2008, celebrates outstanding contributions in the social sciences, and has been won by women 3 out of the 4 times it has been awarded. However, this success rate for women does not reflect the prizes and awards presented by New Zealand’s preeminent science and research organisation accurately. Over the last 104 years, only 10% of all prizes have been awarded to women; with most success coming in the early career award – the Hamilton Memorial Medal, which women have won 11 times since 1923. Of the 19 prizes that are named after a person, just one of them is named after a woman, and 8 of the 21 available prizes and awards have NEVER been awarded to a woman.
Higher percentages of women have won the Dame Joan Metge Medal (75%) and the Pou Aronui Award (28%), and the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal (75%), but these prizes are in the humanities and social sciences, discipline areas generally perceived to have better representation of women – but as the May 2015 update to the Athena SWAN Charter notes:
We commit to addressing unequal gender representation across academic disciplines and professional and support functions. In this we recognise disciplinary differences including:
- the relative underrepresentation of women in senior roles in arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL)[x]
Placed in the context of the relative underrepresentation of women in senior academic roles in humanities and social sciences, that no woman has ever won the Humanities Aronui Medal – for work of outstanding merit in the humanities, or the Mason Durie Medal– “awarded annually to the nation’s preemminent social scientist”[xi] is contextualised within a gap between the perceived relative equity in the humanities and social sciences, and the actual numbers of women in senior roles across those discipline areas.
It’s not hard to see that we have a problem. 8% women prizewinners doesn’t reflect the gender breakdown in society as a whole, but neither does it reflect the breakdown in science. Looking at a couple of individual prizes helps highlight that. Many would not be surprised that the Pickering Medal, technology medal for excellence, has never been awarded to a woman. But neither has the Sir Charles Hercus Medal, for excellence in molecular and cellular sciences, biomedical science or clinical science and public health– fields that many women have made an enormous contribution to.
Things have been getting better – more women are winning more prizes now than ever before. Since 1999 there has been at least 1 female prizewinner per year, a total of 25 prizes to 23 women in 15 years.[xii] Of those, however, 9 have been the Hamilton Memorial Prize (early career) or the Hatherton Award (best paper by a PhD student). That’s still only 16 senior prizes going to 14 women. One swallow does not make a summer, and all that. There’s still those 8 prizes that have never been awarded to a woman, and the T.K Sidey Medal’s been going since 1933. Many outstanding women – some of whom I have named here – have won a singular prize, and then gone on to great careers but, unlike their male counterparts, there’s no prize named for them.
In the UK, WISE – a campaign to promote women in science, technology, and engineering released a summary report in November 2014, “Not for people like me?” under-represented groups in science, technology, and engineering; this coincided with the Nielsen Report on Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment as part of The Nation of Curious Minds/Science and Society Project.
The WISE report states:
Girls … need to resolve the conflict between self-identity and STEM identity in order to see STEM as offering careers ‘for people like me’[xiii]
The Nielsen Report summarises public attitudes towards science and technology with the creation of 5 personas[xiv], representations of different segments of society:
Nielsen Report On Public Attitudes Towards Science and Technology, October 2014
You’ll note that while 3 of these personas are female, both segments of society with the most negative attitude towards science and technology are classified as female; in fact Nielsen go on to say:
In order to lift public engagement with science and technology we suggest that MBIE target the Optimistic Oliver and Penelope Public segments…we believe the Anxious Annie and especially the Negative Nellie group will be more difficult targets to convince[xv]
From those people we, as a scientific community, choose to honour and recognise with medals and awards, through the names given to those prizes, to the names selected to categorise segments of society when discussing public engagement with science, we seem to be saying to young women and girls “not for people like you.”
[i] What is now called the Royal Society of New Zealand was established as the New Zealand Institute in 1867, and renamed the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1933. For the purposes of clarity, this paper will refer to the Royal Society of New Zealand for both.
[ii] Jillet, John. ‘Batham, Elizabeth Joan,’ from The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 4 June 2013
http://www.teara.govt.nz/mi/biographies/5b13/batham-elizabeth-joan
[iii]http://www.nzmaritimeindex.org.nz//izperson.php?personid=999992497&SourceID=&person=E.B.J.&rid=0&refid=&hit=6
[iv] Betty Batham, in the laboratory, 1962 http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/36056/in-the-laboratory-1962
[v] Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1868-1961, vo. 82, 1954-1955, National Library of New Zealand. http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_82/rsnz_82_03_005740.html
[vi]Hector Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/
[vii] Background to the Hector Medal, Royal Society of New Zealand, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/background/
[viii] Margaret Brimble, Hector Medal citation, 2012, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/hector-medal/recipients/
[ix] O’Neale, Dion. RSNZ Awards Visualisation http://bl.ocks.org/droneale/c3c4ea9f48b67722833d
[x] The Athena SWAN Charter, http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/about-athena-swan/
[xi] Mason Durie Medal citation, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/programmes/awards/mason-durie-medal/
[xii] In 2012, Professor Margaret Brimble won three prizes – the Hector, MacDiarmid, and Rutherford Medals.
[xiii] MacDonald, Averil. “Not for people like me?” Under-represented groups in science, technology and engineering, WISE, November 2014, p. 6 https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/not_for_people_like_me.pdf
[xiv] Report on Public Attitudes towards Science and Technology, Nielsen, MBIE, November 2014, p. 11 http://www.msi.govt.nz/assets/MSI/Update-me/Science-in-society-project/report-on-public-attitudes-towards-science-and-technology.pdf
[xv] ibid, p. 13
Some thoughts on Going Public
An abridged version of this blog post appeared in the University of Auckland’s Uninews on June 4th 2015.
Two years ago, towards the end of my term as President of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, a journalist asked me an astonishing question. News of the possible detection of harmful bacteria in a batch of Fonterra’s milk powder had just broken, yet the media was struggling to find any experts who would speak about the tests. The journalist who called me wanted to know whether scientists had gone quiet because the government was muzzling them.
I was surprised. The government has no ability to silence the science community. Although the government owns the Crown Research Institutes, they are not subject to the restrictions that the public service face on communicating with the media. And the responsibility of academic scientists to speak out is spelled out in the Section 162 of the Education Act, where it is made clear that we have a role as the “critic and conscience of society”. For the most part, scientists are free to speak out as they choose.
In practice, things are not so simple. In the case of the milk powder scare, many scientists who did have the expertise felt conflicted through their relationships with Fonterra, the Ministry of Primary Industries, or AgResearch. The silence that resulted meant that uninformed, fringe voices began to get airtime.
One of the few experts who did speak out was University of Auckland microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles. Writing on her well-known blog, Infectious Thoughts, she provided one of the very few scientific perspectives on the story and debunked some of the wilder theories being aired in the media. With this, Dr Wiles quickly became the go to person for the media, and finally, some sound science started appearing in news reports.
Like many researchers who have stepped up in a crisis, Dr Wiles asked herself that if she didn’t do it, who would? Yet, as she noted in her address to the New Zealand Association of Scientists Conference, Going Public, in April, the reaction from many of her colleagues was far from positive. To some, it seemed that she had spoken out of turn. And sadly, as we learned from other delegates at the conference in April, her experiences are far from unique. It seems that the scientific community can be its own worst enemy.
Communicating with the public, whether through the media or otherwise, is often seen as a less than serious pursuit for scientists – something best left for the twilight of one’s career, or to be attempted in the lead up to that crucial funding round. Time on twitter is time away from the lab, a trade-off that no true scientist – god forbid, one early in their career – should be prepared to make. And when an articulate young scientist upstages us in the media, it can ruffle our greying feathers.
Yet communication is a skill, and working with the media requires a great deal of commitment. The scientists who we hear from in public are those that have chosen to work hard at these skills and those who have put the sustained effort needed to build relationships with journalists. It is difficult work, made more difficult at times by the lack of recognition by colleagues or institutions.
It is also important to understand that the media has changed. The business model that supported public interest journalism for centuries is on the brink of collapse. Only Radio New Zealand can support specialist science reporters these days. If you are not pro-active in working with the media, they will often not have the time or resources to come knocking. As Fiona Fox, head of the UK Science Media Centre, puts it “the media will do science better when scientists learn to do the media better.”
If we want a better informed public in New Zealand – and dare I say it, a public prepared to put more tax dollars into university research – then the least we can do is support our colleagues who are working hard to bring this about.
Should the Marsden Fund be restructured?
By Shaun Hendy
The MacDiarmid Institute’s Kate McGrath created a bit of a stir on Friday with a blog post that took a critical look at the Marsden Fund’s decision to invite 15% fewer proposals into the second round of its funding process than it did last year. The Marsden Fund runs a two-round process: applicants submit a one-page expression of interest in February, with about a fifth of these then invited by expert panels to submit a more comprehensive proposal in May.
In 2014 20% of first round applicants were invited to submit a second-round proposal. This year this figure fell to just 17%. Below, I’ve plotted the fraction selected to submit second round proposals since 1998. After a spike in 2003, the fraction selected at the second round has returned to the levels seen in fifteen years ago. So, while not unprecedented, a 17% throughput at the first round is something not seen for a while.
The advantage of running a two-round system is that it can reduce the burden placed on the sector in the writing of comprehensive proposals. If we had a one-round system, everyone who wanted to apply would have to write a comprehensive proposal that was detailed enough for peer review. The more proposals that get through to the second round, the more work there is for the researchers that write them and the selection panels that evaluate them. The Marsden Fund Council chose to reduce the number of proposals selected for the second round this year because they wanted to reduce the workload for the sector.
McGrath is conscious of this issue, having blogged about compliance costs in late 2013: “The compliance costs of everyone applying for everything is costing our country real money that could be used producing real outcomes from the scientists utilising their time to ply their trade; scientific research rather than applying for funding that invariably they will never get.” In other words, the amount of effort we spend writing proposals should not be allowed overwhelm the effort we put in to our research.
Expectations
A slightly different way to look at this is to compute the expected value of writing a second-round proposal i.e. what is the expected pay-off in funding from submitting a second-round proposal? You can compute this by multiplying the likelihood that a second-round proposal will be funded by the average amount awarded. I’ve plotted this quantity below from 2001 to 2014, with a fantasy figure for 2015 based on the Marsden Fund’s indication that this year they will fund 90-95 proposals.
By reducing the number of proposals at the second round, the Marsden Fund Council can increase the expected value of second-round proposals to the applicants. A standard second-round proposal (as opposed to a fast-start) this year is expected to return $315,000-$319,000 compared to $287,000 in 2014. As there is less money available overall this year, if the Marsden Council had okayed a similar proportion of second-round proposals to what it did in 2014, then expected value of a second-round proposal would have fallen to around $250,000. This would have been well below the long-run average of $290,000 for the expected value of a second-round proposal.
However, in her recent post, McGrath says that is now “more difficult to get your foot in the door of arguably the most prestigious grants in the country”. Her concern is that panels might not be expert enough to make good decisions at the first cut, so that the country might be missing out on funding the best science. The assumption that McGrath makes is that decisions made at the second round, when panels have access to expert peer review, will be of significantly higher quality than those at the first round.
Picking winners
Yet recent work by Te Pūnaha Matatini investigator Adam Jaffe suggests that Marsden panels are not very effective at predicting the eventual success of the second round proposals they view. Jaffe’s findings (not yet published, but which were commissioned by the Marsden Fund Council) are broadly consistent with the findings of many similar studies in other countries: panels and peer reviewers are not very good at picking winners (although see this recent article).
These findings do not to say that panels aren’t doing their best. Rather, the evidence suggests it is simply an almost impossible challenge to predict the outcomes of cutting-edge scientific research. It is also far from clear that letting more proposals through to the second round would improve matters. In my opinion, when we know that panels have such a difficult job to do, it is better to acknowledge their limited effectiveness and to reduce the burden on the system accordingly rather than to double down as McGrath suggests.
One-round system?
One of the key disadvantages of a two-round process is that, all things being equal, it will have a much lower success rate than a one-round process. More people will be prepared to chance their arm in round one if they only need to complete a short application. Filling out a single-round application for an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, for instance, is considerably more onerous than the preparation of even a second-round Marsden proposal. The Australians are rewarded for the extra work involved with a success rate of 18%.
Despite this, I still prefer our system. If the ability of expert panels to predict funding success is poor, then better to have a system that minimises transaction costs. And as I noted in a blog post in March, I think we also need to acknowledge the increased research intensity in universities that has driven the oversubscription of the Marsden Fund.
I think the Marsden Fund Council is well aware of the trade-offs described above and has chosen a sensible course. In fact the Council should be commended for commissioning work to investigate the effectiveness of its decision-making process. The real fix for the system – increasing the Marsden Fund to match the increased level of research activity in our universities – is not within the Council’s control.
Ways to Change the World – Thoughts on a Panel at the Auckland Writers’ Festival
by Kate Hannah
Change, always present, is now, more than ever, the dominating feature of life on earth. This is how Phil Ball, the eminent science writer and former editor of Nature, described the world when asked by panel chair Jesse Mulligan what we’re doing right. “It’s more complex, more interconnected, more co-dependent than we’d ever imagined.” This increase in complexity – what Ball calls the shift from “the century of the molecule to the century of the system”- has resulted in a critical challenge to the tools and structures designed to deal with reductionism – the century of the molecule.
Ball had been asked to start with what we’re doing right; he responded with a reference to the last section of The Bone Clocks, by fellow Auckland Writers’ Festival attendee, David Mitchell, which describes an anthropogenic apocalyptic future, in which climate change has wrought severe environmental, social, and economic impacts. A future in which the very nature of the human condition, human society has been irrevocably changed. “I know that’s not what we’re doing right, but it’s an example of how science and technology both solves and creates problems.”
Fellow panellist, the surgeon and science writer Atul Gawande, expanded on this idea of increased complexity, describing how Gorovitz and MacIntyre had summarised human fallibility in 1975 as being caused by either ignorance (“the limitations of the present state of natural science”) or ineptitude (“from the wilfulness of negligence of the natural scientist.”) Gawande sees the state of the world now as related to ineptitude – a systemic failure to apply knowledge correctly, creating a what he describes as “complexities of inequity” in which things like life expectancy, infant mortality, female education levels, vary greatly between countries and within socio-economic and/or ethnic groups within countries.
Chinese journalist in exile, Xinran, whose radio interviews and books focusing on women in rural China provide a window into the complexities of inequity Gawande describes echoes the rate of change as a key contributing factor to the status quo. China, which has travelled from pre-industrial to post- industrial in three generations, calls into question the very notion of human happiness or wellbeing as the overarching goal of human society. Xinran’s China is a country in which there is a 200-year gap between the industrialised cities and the rural countryside, one in which the pinnacle of human happiness for a woman is to bear a son. There’s a cold draft that fills the ASB Theatre when Xinran talks about the 30 million missing Chinese daughters, a gap made since the introduction of the one child policy.
For Xinran, discourse moves between what is real and what is imagined – she evokes the I Ching as a text that described, well before we had scientific language to reveal it, the intersection of place and time, the code (DNA) embedded within everything. This notion of describing the human condition in multiple languages lies at the heart of ways to change the world. Charlotte Grimshaw, the novelist and short story writer, notes that both Ball and Gawande, as science writers, use examples from literature in their science writing. Gawande’s most recent book, Being Mortal, refers extensively to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which explores what it means to live, and thus die, without meaningful, human connection. Similarly, Ball refers to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen in his exploration of the uncertainty principle, and his discussion of the choices made by scientists during the Nazi era. For this panel, Snow’s two cultures are not riven apart, but connected by a shared language of image and metaphor that deepens human understanding.
I like to think that we at Te Pūnaha Matatini speak this language too; we’re aware of the impact of both ignorance and ineptitude, consistently trying to tell good, true stories about our increasingly interconnected and data-rich world. In this interplay between our existing human tools and structures, designed to deal with the twentieth century –there’s a sense that we’ve missed something in trying to reduce matter to its constituent parts – and the world we live in, in which the sum total of human knowledge concerns just 4 % of the universe – wherein we need to develop tools to understand self-organising phenomena that form complex patterns and hierarchies – is the founding motivation bringing this team of people together.
Given that what emerged from last Sunday’s panel discussion was a shared sense that the thing we are doing right is talking about the problems we face, the decisions we have to make, the increased need for human connection, Te Pūnaha Matatini’s central metaphor – ‘the meeting place for many faces’ – becomes more critical. It’s both an actual place in which many faces (peoples, disciplines, ideas) meet, and an image of how we imagine the best kind of human thinking and human interaction occurs, face to face, kanohi ki te kanohi. Charlotte Grimshaw said that what she and her fellow panellists, fellow writers’ festival participants and attendees were endeavouring to do was to “illuminate the problems that beset humanity;” more prosaically, we’ve said that at Te Pūnaha Matatini we’re trying to transform complex data about New Zealand into knowledge, tools, and insight to help make better decisions.
Better decisions? When asked for next steps, Ball responded: “Actually, we know what we need to change the world: we need more equality, more justice, more compassion, more tolerance, more love.” Pressed for a scientific answer – as the scientist on the panel – Ball responded with a list of value-filled abstract nouns. Gawande’s words take this notion of value further – describing happiness or wellbeing as emerging from a sense of purpose and connection. “We’ve lost the moral language that would allow us to ask the right questions.” As writers, as wisdom-seekers, as humans, the panel – a journalist, an author, a scientist, and a surgeon – agreed: the way to change the world is to adopt a stance based within family, human connection, relationship. From that place to stand, we then must engage compassion and curiosity – Gawande called these “the virtues or characters we need to bring to see the world.” Listening to those words, I instantly bought to mind our Te Pūnaha Matatini whakataukī: E tipu, e rea, mō ngā rā ō tāu ao. Grow up and thrive for the days destined you. Like Xinran, Grimshaw, Ball, Gawande, we’re approaching the questions at hand from a place of connection, compassion, and curiosity.
Dr Sarah Morgan on NZAS 2015
Scicomm: Building a Sledgehammer for the Walls Between Science and Society
I’ve been wracking my brain about how to structure this piece, and have picked so many starts and specific topics that I’ve tied myself up into a delightful hot mess. I typed 9 pages of notes on the day and have had numerous follow-up discussions. Each and every one was wonderfully rich, somewhat opinionated and never resolved.
There is just so much to talk about, from the #GoingPublic conference of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, that we are going to be talking for a long time. (which is lucky since it’s taken me so long to get this piece out…).
One of the sound bites that remained with me was the thought that this conversation, about scientists speaking out in public, might be one that needs to be repeated every generation: each time it will reach someone new. I see great similarities between this idea and feminism, which in itself further highlights the sexism undercurrent to the discussions around scicomm efforts in New Zealand. Uh oh: all the controversial topics are coming out.
I’m going to break this up into sections, and review what a) struck me as the most pertinent, poignant points raised during the conference or b) were clarified by my attendance. It’s interesting that the main points turned out to be about scicomm in general, rather than specifically with regards to scientists speaking up on controversial issues in public.
- Hypercritique, including sexism
This is number one because I see it as the major roadblock holding scientists ‘above’ the general public. If we hold ourselves and our peers to such lofty measures of perfection, no effort is ever going to be good enough. No effort is ever going to be recognised as having value, even if it is very small. I believe every effort at such a point has value, even if negatively received by the public (to a certain degree); the action of getting scientists out there will help along the path to normalisation of having scientists in society.
Hypercriticism in this scicomm context is a reflexive denigration of engagement efforts. It tends to be couched behind phrases illustrated by some as having been the direct recipient of. One’s achievements in the main stream media are not ‘worth’ anything, your expertise is not specifically on that topic therefore you have no ‘right’ to speak up on it, your way of doing this is outdated/bad/wrong etc/my way is better/you should be doing it like that, your research isn’t even that good, you’re not even a professor yet etcetera: peers being reflexively and overtly negative in response to scientists who have made efforts towards engagement with the public.
I use the word ‘reflexively’ because I don’t think we even realise we do it anymore. We are all trained to critique the papers we read, to critique our own and others methodology, manuscripts and grant applications. It’s a habit – one that is valuable in the context of the scientific process – but detrimental in the scicomm/society space where being personable and establishing social connection/empathy are the keys towards engaging a lay audience.
Several presenters spoke to this point, though not all directly. As mentioned earlier, there were examples of comments received from scientific peers, but also opinions from a perspective of ‘harden up, ducks-back the comments’, which raised further discussion and again dovetailed with the sexism in science theme – at which point do you stop ignoring negative aspects of the local culture and push for change at every opportunity? I strongly suspect the level of antagonism/scorn/vitriol received from one’s scientific peers as a result of scicomm efforts is rather gender dependent.
Revolution: Find something complementary to say about a scientific colleague’s scicomm efforts and imagine saying it out loud to their face. Expert level: go say it out loud to their face.
Fight the subconscious hypercriticism habit.
- Public expert vs public intellectual
This is intertwined with the first point on hypercriticism, in that it is very easy to judge another person as one or the other, but very difficult to judge oneself – especially after any measure of success in your endeavours, which might reinforce your personal belief in one direction or the other. Hypercritique comes in with the verbal cutting down of people supposing themselves to be public intellectuals rather than experts. “You don’t even study that topic – what right do you have to be on the news speaking about it?!” New Zealand’s infamous tall poppy syndrome is rife within this conversation.
Side note: It has a word! Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.
I need this word in my life https://t.co/uEELyLQcZS
"Ultracrepidarianism is [.] giving opinions [.] on matters outside of one's knowledge."— Philipp Bayer (@PhilippBayer) May 3, 2015
I think the public has come some way towards accepting the expert, but less so the intellectual. Or perhaps the difficulty comes in with the public being as unable to identify worthy intellectuals as we are personally as scientists. Trust is put in anyone who speaks up with authority until a point where they show themselves to have zero clue – usually in a highly embarrassing and public manner. The public intellectual is a rare beast, and appointment is obviously fraught with danger. The public expert on the other hand is able and encouraged to speak up at any point when their topic of expertise is brought into the public eye. Until we can clarify the role of the public intellectual, perhaps we should focus on encouraging the public expert to speak up, and encouraging more and diverse public experts to make their mark in the media.
I’d also like to re-raise a point here, though it takes us on a tangent:
Interesting that the politicians got a chief science advisor before the public did. What are our priorities? #GoingPublic
— SM Morgan (@DrSMMorgan) April 9, 2015
The message is very much so that the government requires a science advisor to help make decisions for the good of the country: as opposed to a science advisor to society, to support them in their requirements of their government.
The public intellectual in a position of chief science advisor to the New Zealand public, is a powerful dream. An office which could become known for its unbiased and effective research, answering any question at any point, providing the data for backing up stories in the news and elsewhere. Weigh in on public debates or controversies. Communicate the science behind 1080 or vaccinations or oil drilling to society from a position of elected authority…can scientists as a group not provide this function? Was this part of the dream for the Science Media Centre and scientists in conjunction?
Revolution: Talk about your work within your community when it comes up in the media. You don’t have to be on TV or radio – ring the local schools and see if the teachers want to bring it up in class, try the local Rotary or Women’s Institute meetings.
- The Celebrity Scientist
This is, of course, tied up with the first 2 points and very poignantly illustrated in the USA where anyone with a PhD and some amount of showmanship can start their own science/health literacy-based TV show. However, my bugbear is that turning scientists into celebrities completely flies in the face of the normalisation of science in society goal. Wrapped up in the second point, any measure of media success can very easily thrust a scientist from their comfortable and somewhat safe role of public expert into the public intellectual role where they are called upon to give their opinion on topics and situations vastly removed from their professional expertise. However, I believe that normalising scientists in society would be helped greatly by more scientists speaking out on more topics, with the proviso that they are sure to phrase it as their own opinion. After all, the academy is full of over-educated, strongly opinionated individuals who are as human and subject to the same flaws as the lawyer or the builder. Having this more openly acknowledged would help the public see scientists as real people once again – but in a way where your offering your opinion is not concurrent with an appointment as a public intellectual/authority. When schools or engagement programmes are looking for a scientist to chat with a class or do an experiment or presentation– why go for the semi-famous one who’s on TV or the radio all the time, which will not go any way towards normalising science or the tertiary study environment (a goal of schools with low rates of students going on to further education). I suggest instead finding the regular Dr Bloggs, who has no notoriety whatsoever, but knows her subject just as well. Perhaps even open the field and try to find a scientist who attended your school, or lives in the area. Least I ruffle too many feathers – I do not mean to say that having recognisable, ‘celebrity’ scientists in mainstream media is bad – I just don’t think all engagement efforts with the public should remain solely in their court.
If there was one lesson to take away from the conference (according to the gospel of me) it would be, not surprisingly, collaboration. Collaboration not only between scientific peers (and in an encouraging, supportive manner – down with hypercriticism!): but between sectors, fields – all things. Find a journalist and build a relationship. Find a policy/ministry employee and build a relationship. Find a school, find a sports club, find a new lab, find a community group, find a blog, find a mind – and communicate with it.
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END I’d like to thank Te Pūnaha Matatini for getting me to the NZAS conference this year. I think the best part about academia is the collaborative and community atmosphere that is illustrated so perfectly at conferences. Academia, and science in particular, will always be better when we work together, when we collaborate and learn with and from each other. The New Zealand Centres of Research Excellence are a beautiful example of this, and Te Pūnaha Matatini is pushing the boundaries connecting academia with business and industry.
Dr SM Morgan is a Research Fellow at the Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, working on translation interventions in the health literacy field.
Big Astro
The advent of the web and social media have led to a huge outpouring of enthusiasm for science but almost all sciences have skeletons in their closet, some real and some imaginary. Physicists gave us the bomb, chemists cook up the chemicals they put in the food (yes, yes, and you cheerfully drink H-2-O and breathe O-2) and even if medical researchers have doubled our lifespan many will claim they are in thrall to Big Pharma and specialise in diseases of the rich, in addition to perpetrating more specific and chilling abuses. But astronomers often sail past earthly concerns. After all, what’s not to like? Astronomy generates an endless stream of stories about strange planets, unlikely stars, and the birth of the universe, but nothing anyone can easily get upset about.
Even journalists suspend their usual rules for astronomy and other good-news science stories. Copy approval, sending sources a draft of an article for commentary and correction, is anathema to journalists on a hard news story, but I am often sent drafts “to check the details” when I talk to the media about astronomy. So perhaps this is why astronomers have been caught flat-footed by the apparently sudden eruption of protest around the Thirty Metre Telescope, or TMT. The issue is not the $1.3 billion price tag but its location at the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest peak on Hawai`i’s Big Island. The problem is that while Mauna Kea is a fantastic place for astronomy (a huge mountain rising out of the Pacific Ocean; the skies above it are stable and clear) it is also sacred to many native Hawai`ians. The issues are far from straightforward, but Buzzfeed (in its new incarnation as a purveyor of long-form news) and the Huffington Post have summaries of recent events and TMT consortium has put its own response to the controversy online. However, for some astronomers it has led to the discovery that they may not always be the good guys.
While we might wish it were otherwise, astronomy is not apolitical. Science communicators (myself included) wax eloquent about space exploration, but the space race was launched by Cold War competition. Nor is the politicisation of astronomy new. The British navigator, James Cook, set sail in the Endeavour from Plymouth in 1768 to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, as part of a campaign to determine the overall scale of the solar system. Cook carried additional sealed orders to be opened after the transit observations were complete, which told him to continue from Tahiti on a voyage of discovery into the Pacific; part of the larger competition between European powers to explore trade-routes and acquire outposts around the world. (By many accounts, the contents of those orders were well-known around London before he sailed.) And like a modern-day space programme, Cook’s voyages were a simultaneous national investment in pure science, prestige and geopolitical leverage. [And Cook and Hawaii are tightly connected – he commanded the first European ships to make landfall in Hawai’i, and was killed in a skirmish there in 1778.]
New Zealand and Hawai`i are both parts of the Polynesian world. As a New Zealander, much of the language used by the Mauna Kea protestors is familiar…READ MORE